Playing Ys games “in order” the way I like to play series offered a unique challenge out of the gate. Falcom’s original flagship series was incredibly messy for decades, with almost every entry having multiple versions from back when different versions on different consoles meant often wildly different expressions of the same core concepts, from sound and visuals to level design and gameplay mechanics. Ys IV was famously outsourced for its two versions to two separate studios who didn’t collaborate at all and this resulted in two completely different games both titled Ys IV with different subtitles to differentiate them, which worked from the same design outline but otherwise diverged wildly. Things started to level out for the series with the release of Ys VI on the PS2 and PSP, and since then there’s a mainline Ys game every once in a while, but Falcom has also gone back and fully remade the first four Ys games alongside their work in furthering the series. These remakes are considered the definitive versions by the developers and “canon” to the overarching plot, such as there is one, but even they don’t totally simplify things. They came out haphazardly between Ys VI, VII, and Origin, and occasionally share engines with these games, which means that Ys Origin, VI, and III play the same, IV and VII play the same, VIII and IX play the same, and I & II live in their own little thing. There is currently no recognized Ys V because Falcom never remade it and it languishes on the SNES, technically having happened in the canon of the story but unrecognized by its own creators.

So here I am, playing Ys III, which is both the fifth Ys game chronologically and the second game to iterate upon this particular engine and play style, which originated in Ys VI. Do you see what I mean? This is outrageous. What’s going on here.

Anyway all of this is to say Falcom wins they broke me they broke my stupid shitty brain I do not give a shit about playing these games in release order I won’t do it I’m just gonna fuckin play the remakes in the order the numbers go in on the boxes. FUCK it bro. Origins can plop in after 6 I don’t give a SHIT. Maybe I’ll play some old ones later we’ll fuckin see.

A N Y W A Y Oath in Felghana fuckinggggggg slaps super hard bro this game is so fun it ALMOST makes me okay with the fact that they got rid of Bump Combat. Where Ys I & 2 Chronicle, the remakes of the first two games, are very clearly facelifts of the most beloved versions of those two games that otherwise preserve their cor designs and gameplay, Oath is a ground up reimagining of Ys III: Wanderers of Ys, which was originally a Zelda 2-like on the SNES. Now, rather than that OR the classic Ys style, we’ve landed on a fully 3D isometric game that kind of EMULATES the visual identity of classic top-down Ys games except when they think it would be cool to do anything else. All the characters are 3D models filtered and scrubbed to look sprite-ish, but the camera swoops and swerves with you to give dynamic or dramatic angles whenever it’s appropriate. Sometimes this is used for general sidescrolling, or classic spiral staircase traversal, but a lot of the time it’s just for the flair of things, and in a game that introduces as much platforming as Oath does it’s welcome to be able to offer different vantage points.

Combat itself evokes the FEELING of Bump Combat, expressed in a more normal mode. Adol has a six hit combo that you get by just mashing the fuck out of the attack button, a small combo when he’s jumping into the air, and a plunging attack he can execute at the height of a jump that stuns most enemies. As you acquire magical bracelets throughout the game you also acquire a ranged fireball, a spin attack, and a charge that doubles as an i-frame counter if you time it right. And that’s it! It’s not deep and it’s really arcadey-feeling, but where the game is clever is in the way the game works itself around your small skill set, always introducing new enemy types and frequently dolling out bosses with unique mechanics that require special deployment of abilities, often only for the moment of the game. I don’t think this works EVERY time (fighting airborne enemies in particular always feels a little wonky), and the balance of the game feels tuned a little too specifically so that often the difference between doing no damage to a boss and creaming them is grinding out only a couple of levels, but overall combat is as fast and fluid FEELING as ever even if that’s not practically true.

Something that I think is absolutely fucking insane about Ys is that it’s setting is like...Barely Fake Real World Plus Monsters??? It’s set largely on a continent that just looks like Europe ass Europe, the main antagonistic presence in the background of all of these is the Romun Empire with a U, there’s talk of the continent of Afroca with a O??? Why are you doing this Falcom, make something up!! The plot of this game revolves around this fake Catholic church which I would not blink an eye at aesthetically in a JRPG except that in this game they are explicitly a stand-in for the real life actual ass Catholic church it’s so weird! It just hits different when you’re hanging out in Fake Germany lol. It’s called like Garmany or something it’s so funny.

The region of Felghana itself though is very pleasant. Like the first two Ys games you still have a sort of central town area that you return to over and over to chat with the locals and upgrade your equipment and maybe pickup a sidequest, and as is typical for modern Falcom the flavor writing here is full of personality despite these people and their plight being super generic. You visit standard Mines and Icy Mountains and Lava Caverns but rather than feel generic in a bad way it does carry that classic vibe, like this game may be from 2005 but it’s really carrying the 1991 sensibilities on its back, which is what I want from this sort of project.

The driving force of the plot in this game is this guy who really wants to get revenge on the local tyrant and he devises this really convoluted and massively destructive way to do it (it’s poetic you see, because the Count destroyed his entire island and all the people on it, so it will be good to massacre people in proximity to the count, even though they are his servants and suffer under him and he doesn’t care about them). This kind of feels like a classic lib-brain “the bad guy is right but too much” thing right, like this guy is right that the Count did a genocide and deserves to die but people will be like nooooo killing is wroooooong nooooooo. Hilariously though this is not really what happens? Like yeah there’s a little bit of that but there’s more than one scene where people try to talk him down and their arguments are more like “what if you ONLY murdered the Count, or drove him into exile or something.” Both times they’re like “you know EVERYBODY hates the count right like if your plan simply wasn’t to murder everyone in the castle too you could get the whole town in on this EASY, NOBODY would care.” EVEN the count’s wife is immediately like “yo fuck this guy” when given evidence of his crimes lmao but no our buddy does in fact unleash a curse on the castle that literally just kills all the staff people and damn their souls to Fake Catholic Hell forever and unleash Mega Satan, WHILE GOING OUT OF HIS WAY to protect the countess and her children specifically. WHAT a prick lol.

But idk I feel like that beat is kind of my thing on the game in a nutshell it’s just kind of goofy and loose and hard to take too seriously and it’s constantly serving me fun shit to dig into even when it’s executing a lot of stuff in a way that feels just like 15% off the mark. As an expansion of the design core of Ys 1 and 2 I think it does a way more interesting job of incorporating magic into both combat and traversal but WAIT really I need to be comparing it to YS VI FUCK

anyway it’s good I had a good time it’s only like fifteen hours long that’s the sweet spot